Transcript Resilience as a goal for quality management systems design

Some reflections on doing
literature review in the context of
action research
Petter Øgland
19th PhD Days Workshop,
Oslo, September 2, 2010
Presentation plan
• Short background to my PhD research design and the
problems I want to address through an action research
approach
• How I have been working with theory and related
research in doing and writing my PhD research
• My experiences and recommendations for beginning
PhD students – Five challenges
Designing information systems as
religious war (Hanseth, 2001)
TQM
practitioner
Challenge #1: Choosing the
main theoretical perspective
• Do we want to make conversations with scholars
sitting on the fence?
• Or, do we want to make conversations with
scholars in the trench?
• Different conversations imply different literature
reviews
Challenge #2: Identifying the
relevant scholarly debates
Good guys = practitioners trying to design
information systems (QMS in my case)
Bad guys = human and non-human actors
(actants) working against the success of the
practitioners
Donald Schön (1983; 1987)
Trying to understand the game
in order to improve play
2. Their move…
1. Our move
(IS action research
team)
3. Why did they do that?
What are these people
thinking? What do we
know about similar
cases? What is their
strategy? What will be
their next move?
4. How can we improve
our strategy?
Literature review
Challenge #3: Literature review
for understanding the game
• What does it mean to understand?
– The role of scientific models in scientific research
(Suppes, 1957; van Frassen, 1980; Giere, 1987)
– Design Science (Simon, 1996; Järvinen, 2007)
• How does the literature review section relate to
other chapters of the thesis/paper?
– V-model (Novak & Gowan, 1984)
– Look for “error signals” when comparing literature
review with case study (Box, 1977)
Challenge #4: Literature review
for developing strategy
• “I wish sociologists would think more like
computer scientists” (Kristen Nygaard, 1999)
• Bootstrap Algorithm (Hanseth & Aanestad, 2001;
Hanseth, 2006; Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010;
Skorve & Aanestad, 2010)
– Complex adaptive systems
– Evolutionary game theory
– Genetic algorithms
Challenge #5: Avoid attacking
straw men
•
•
•
Difficult to identify the real
scholarly debates, because there
are so many fake debates
Can critical theory based on
hermeneutics go beyond
indoctrination? You either agree
or you don’t understand.
In order to have real debates
(“bourgeois public sphere”) I
believe we have to ground the
social science in falsifiable
theory (cf. Gintis, 2009).
Summary
•
•
•
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•
Challenge #1: Action research or detached research
Challenge #2: Finding the right scholarly debate
Challenge #3: Descriptive research: Building the model
Challenge #4: Prescriptive research: Identifying strategy
Challenge #5: Real knowledge comes from real science